Sad Raiders Fans Fail To Keep Team In Oakland By Squatting On Trademark

from the told-you dept

It was way back in the early part of 2016 that the rumors came out that the Oakland Raiders football team would be moving to a new home city. Fans were understandably upset and voiced their displeasure in a variety of ways, but the dumbest of those ways certainly must have been Lane Blue's attempt to trademark the team name in conjunction with all of the different potential landing cities the team was rumored to be moving to, including the "Las Vegas Raiders." Lane wasn't the only sad Raiders fan to attempt this, it seems, as we now see reporting on his and other trademark applications being denied for obvious reasons.

Lane Blue, an air-freight company owner from Fresno, Calif., said that he applied for the trademark in an effort to stop the Raiders from relocating to Las Vegas.

"If I own the trademark that’s worth possibly millions of dollars, maybe I can talk them into staying," Blue said, per KCBS.

Blue's application was denied, as is likely with everyone else who applied for the trademark.

The reason for the denial is that trademarks must be used in commerce in order to be valid. Trolling your favorite NFL team in order to prevent it from moving cities is not, as best as I can tell, a form of commerce. Instead, it's a form of being a mere annoyance to both that team and the Trademark Office. These squatting attempts, motivated either by fandom or attempts at a quick cash-grab, almost never work.

"These people think they’re going to cash in, and 99.9 percent of the time, they’re wrong," sports-trademark attorney Patrick Jennings said, per KCBS. "For a trademark lawyer, it doesn’t take much effort to knock those (applications) out separate from the patent and trademark office."

The only effect these applications are likely to have on the Raiders is a delay on them receiving the trademark. That could still be damaging, though, as knock-off "Las Vegas Raiders" gear is already flooding the marketplace.

And that's supremely unfair for the Raiders ownership to have to spend the time and capital slapping these applications down. Meanwhile, of course, the Trademark Office is collecting the application fees from members of the public who somehow think a trademark application will bend an NFL team to its knees. Sorry, Raiders fans and get-rich-quick people, it isn't going to work.

Filed Under: lane blue, not how it works, raiders, trademark, trademark squatting

Sad Raiders Fan Tries To Keep Team In Oakland By Squatting On Trademark

from the that-won't-work dept

I'm not certain why people think this will work, but there seems to be an idea floating around a few of our fellow citizens that they can simply force their favorite sports teams to do what they want by filing trademarks for things they never intend to use. You may recall the story about a jackass in North Dakota who wanted to prevent the University of North Dakota from changing its name from The Fighting Sioux to, well, anything else that had been suggested by filing for trademarks on all the other things that had been suggested. Such a strategy was doomed to fail from the beginning for any number of reasons, but mostly because you actually have to be using what you're trying to trademark in commerce in order to get it approved, and trolling isn't a commercial enterprise as far as I know.

Now we have another story, though it shifts from one of trolling to one of simple sadness, as a Raiders fan who doesn't want his team to move to San Antonio, as reportedly might soon happen, has decided to launch a preemptive strike by filing for a trademark for "San Antonio Raiders."

An Oakland Raiders season-ticket holder who wants the team to remain in the East Bay has filed a trademark application for the name “San Antonio Raiders.”

“I figured if I took over the name, San Antonio Raiders, I could force (the team) to stay in Oakland,” Lane Blue of Fresno, California, said in a phone interview.

I'm loathe to heap any real anger upon a Raiders fan, because it seems to me that life as a Raiders fan must be so horrible so as to warp the brain to some degree, but anyone with a bare minimum of knowledge of how trademarks work knows this isn't going to work. Again, you have to use the mark in commerce to get a trademark at all, and Lane Blue would have to show that he's using the mark in a way with which the Raiders would be competing. Also, if the team really is planning on a move to San Antonio, it would be criminal for the team's lawyers not to have already begun the trademark filing process. Regardless, you can expect the application to be reviewed and summarily denied.

But the larger point is that this is a symptom of what permission culture does: it makes the uninformed think that tools like trademark allow for a sort of monopolistic control where it actually doesn't. Why does it do this? Well, because too many times trademark, and other intellectual property laws, skirt or outright cross the line into that exact sort of heavy-handed protectionism, albeit in a less obvious way.

So sorry, Raiders fan. You can't use intellectual property to force your team to stay nearby. Now, maybe if your last name was Disney, on the other hand...

Filed Under: lane blue, oakland, raiders, san antonio, trademark